Culture

01

If the day one of Tucker Carlson's mavericky money pit The Daily Caller is any indication, the talent pool on the journalistic right has become a foot bath, or perhaps a finger bowl. It's as if P. J. O'Rourke sired a litter of smart alecks who are now all grown up and ready to take their place in the cafeteria line of the Cato Institute of Performing Arts.

There's S. E. Cupp, author of an upcoming crap about liberalism's war on religion, a tired subject for a tired people, arriving five years after John Gibson milked that particular cow with The War on Christmas. Day one of Cupp's diary, in which she introduces herself to the tea baggers drifting into the tent, seems similarly dated in its attitudes and antagonisms. "Valuing the sanctity of life, the traditional family, the 2nd Amendment, personal responsibility, low taxes and a limited government puts me at odds with the esteemed cultural taste arbiters of our great nation-like Alec Baldwin and Rosie O'Donnell," she snorts. Rosie O'Donnell left The View in 2007 and everybody loves Alec Baldwin now--get with the program. She even makes a crack about France that sounds like Jonah Goldberg in his cheese-eating surrender-monkeys heyday, when the invasion of Iraq seemed like such a fun idea.

Also making with the merriment is the Daily Caller's advice columnist, Matt Labash, who made his name, such as it is, as a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. He will field questions from readers, though the only relevant question to ask a Weekly Standard contributor is how they wash the blood off their hands every night after work. Labash, like Cupp, is not exactly using his forum to break in new material, jokily referring to Rachel Maddow as "the sexiest man alive," because she's a lesbian and being a lesbian makes her a man, get it? He also has a bit, vis a vis Tiger Woods' taste in mistresses, where he conflates ethnic women with ethnic food to hee-larious effect. "Don't get me wrong. I like white women. I even married one. But after say, a rousing win at Pebble Beach, do I really want to celebrate by shacking up with the same old vanilla white woman? I might be in the mood for Chinese. Which of course means, that an hour later, I'll want Mexican." Sounds like Jay Leno material, it's that bad.

And then there's Jim Treacher's blog, which is so effortfully rib-tickling that it's like something that fell off the back of the wagon at Pajamas Media.

A wise man (I believe it was Kingsley Amis) said that the fatal mistake many writers make is not understanding the difference between being funny and being facetious. Funny is natural, it jumps out at you, it expresses individuality--a distinctive point of view. Facetiousness is more of a synthetic foam that fills an inert body of prose with the equivalent of an all-purpose grin. If facetiousness is given free rein at The Daily Caller, it may be because Tucker Carlson himself has the forced laugh of a failed comedian, that artificial honk known as a guffaw.